Facial Expression and Mirror-Neurones

The discovery of mirror-neurones might help us remove certain issues from our approach to facial expression. They might, for instance, have helped Darwin:

“There are other actions which are commonly performed under certain circumstances, independently of habit, and which seem to be due to imitation or some sort of sympathy. Thus persons cutting anything with a pair of scissors may be seen to move their jaws simultaneously with the blades of the scissors. Children learning to write often twist about their tongues as their fingers move, in a ridiculous fashion. When a public singer suddenly becomes a little hoarse, many of those present may be heard, as I have been assured by a gentleman on whom I can rely, to clear their throats; but here habit probably comes into play, as we clear our own throats under similar circumstances.” p. 1086.

Little other than the workings of mirror-neurones is needed to understand why people would mimic certain movements perceived. This should be so, because there is no psychology—or meaningful translation—to be found in the transposing of the perceived into the mimicked. That is the good news about physiological explanations: they deliver us from certain questions. However, this nice feat they do not achieve by answering questions, but by clarifying their non-psychological nature. I submit that we won’t get any decisive answers to questions about psychology, social significance, values, and so on, from reductions to causal processes.

A possible role played by mirror-neurones: some people are more prone to emotions because they have more (better?) mirror-neurones than others. This may be true; but it is not clear how it solves issues like those concerning the roles of emotions and their recognition, their intentional objects, and their psychological semantics. Emotional capacities are genetically inherited, but concrete emotions depend on input: triggers, associations, anticipation and dispositions. Mirror-neurones and proprioceptive re-enactment seem (obviously) to play a bigger role in our recognition of expression than in what seems to be a more straightforwardly receptive case of perception: seeing a colour. Remembering experientially seems to fit the former; recognising the use of a hammer; perceiving with all senses our surroundings, too. I may not be impressed by the find of the mirror-neurones, but that is due to my scepticism of mind-body dualism and of the issue of other minds consequent thereupon, or of solipsism for that matter.

The peculiar role of mirror-neurones seems to support Alan Fridlund’s co-evolution thesis, which says that expression and empathy co-evolved. What expression and empathy would then have saddled us up with, genetically, is mirror-neurones. Nevertheless, mirror-neurones do not help us understand the relevant mental processes, and these are crucial because the reciprocal addressing at work in facial expression is saturated with semantics, and psychological reality, but mirror-neurones are strictly local, ad hoc, explanations of the physical reality—perhaps—necessary for these semantics to emerge. Mirror neurones may be necessary conditions for the development of expression and empathy (the socially reciprocal process), they most certainly are not sufficient.

References

— Darwin, Charles. 2005. “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.” In The Indelible Stamp. Four Essential Volumes in One, edited by James D. Watson, 1061–1258. Philadelphia and London: Running Press.
— Fridlund, Alan J. 1997. “The new ethology of human facial expressions.” In The Psychology of Facial Expression, edited by James A. Russell and José-Miguel Fernandez-Dols, 103–32. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.